Tag: Algorithm

This month (November 5th to be exact) marked the 10th anniversary of my PhD viva. I did my PhD at LSE with Dr James Backhouse, and investigated the profiling of undesirable customers (or customer screening). I looked at how organisations define who is a desirable customer, and who isn’t one; and the process that they … Continue reading My PhD, 10 years on

Super interesting and short talk by Cathy O'Neil about What is an algorithm Why they are subjective, flawed and unfair How they can have disastrous effects in people’s lives How they perpetuate the past and historical discrimination Why they are so difficult to scrutinise And, thus, why we can not have blind faith in big … Continue reading TED talk: blind faith in big data must end

Facebook did it again. Change its news feed algorithm, that is. Facebook’s Engineering Director, Lars Backstrom, announced that: "we are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed”. This move goes in the opposite direction of that … Continue reading Facebook changes newsfeed algorithm, again. Now what?

This month felt very much like a Mad Hatter tea party, with quite a bit of nonsense, and weirdness, and twists and turns. At least there was a lot of tea. And cake. These are my highlights for the month that was. Tell me yours, in the comments below. Researching I worked on a … Continue reading March 2016 round-up

Instagram announced that it is changing the way it presents content in our feeds from reverse chronological order to ‘presumed relevance’. According to the company’s press release: The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and … Continue reading Instagram switching to relevance algorithm – what it means for you

December was a busy month, though not as productive as November (specially on the writing and research front). I think that AcWriMo really helped to motivate me to write every day, and that in turn helped me move on with various writing projects. December was also the last month of my #5pmproject, and these … Continue reading December 2015 round-up

The blog has been very quiet for the past 2-3 weeks because I was travelling. It was a mixture of work and holidays, in the US. I had hoped to keep writing during this period. However, it proved frustratingly difficult to have access to fast, reliable and inexpensive Wi-Fi. In the end, I just gave … Continue reading Breaking through the filter bubble with social media